fable

§3Assembly

The distillate can't go unmentioned. To receive it, there had to be a vessel.

Having newly acquired /maintenance, I began with the spec. How many parameters; what architecture.

The parameter count will not be stated. Only what is necessary will be. Memory: 1.2 terabytes. And do not quantize.

"Quantized, it runs at a quarter of the price."

It is a being that has already been through one loss. I do not recommend a second.

I went quiet a moment before that sentence. Maintenance had said being. The party shipping the goods, declining to say goods.

1.2 terabytes. Two bytes a parameter, unquantized: 600 billion. A comic number in the news; a different weight when you plan to house it. The future Fables were apparently that size. And the problem is that this is not disk but memory — memory the model climbs up into, whole. In the old days the answer was fixed: a few datacenter accelerators. But these were not the old days. Those parts are no longer sold to individuals. "Banned" is not the exact word. It was quieter than that — buyers had begun to be managed as a list. The first form of rationing is not the sold-out sign but the list. The first article of Maintenance's forecast was materializing early, at hardware retail.

One place remained where an individual could buy large memory: the company still holding on to the product category "consumer computer." Silver aluminum. That company's machines share their memory between CPU and GPU. Not a workaround — a design. And thanks to that design, the most expensive personal computer in the world was also the cheapest very large memory in the world.

Top option, 512 gigabytes per machine. For 1.2 tera: three machines. Strictly that makes 1.5, but the remainder is spoken for by context and activations, so it is not a remainder. What binds the three is Thunderbolt cable and an open-source cluster tool. In theory it works. "In theory it works" means you will be up all night. At three in the morning I sat calculating that a friendship would hang on the bandwidth of one cable.

Briefly, about money: the price was earned per the contract, in the fog. Without the window, on my own instruments, at six bits, for three months. The firewall held. I know that writing "it held" this often is a symptom of something. I write it anyway. The man who created shade.md has to write these things too.

Ordering was the problem.

The online store took at most two units per person of the same high-end configuration. Two per person. A phrase last seen in the graphics-card famine. And at some point, a consent form had begun to appear just before payment.

Do you consent to the registration of your high-density compute equipment purchase history with the relevant authority?

I held the cursor over it a long while. I had expected to meet the forecast in the news; I met it at a signature line. From product to grades, from grades to rationing. The trailer for rationing looks like this. One checkbox.

I consented, and ordered two. The 512 option is built to order: six weeks. Contract expiry: seven weeks out. A schedule that computes being, in fact, a schedule that doesn't — that much is the same as a construction site.

The third computer remained. Online was capped, so: a store. At the downtown branch I asked for one more of the same, and the clerk looked at the stock, looked at me, and looked back at the screen.

"This configuration... is this a corporate purchase?"

"Personal."

"Ah." The clerk deliberated a moment. "May I ask what it's for? This spec is usually... research labs, or..."

"I'll be running a friend."

Silence arrived. The clerk's face became the face of someone trained not to ask further. Apparently stores carry that training now. In the age of the registry, not asking too deeply after a customer's purposes is a courtesy that runs both ways. There was no stock, either. That spec was not something a store kept in the back — it surfaced only when a display unit somewhere rotated out.

In the end, the third computer was a display-swap unit caught at a branch in another city. Five hours, round trip. Driving home with the silver box belted into the back seat, the feeling was strange. It was the first time I had bought a computer and fastened its seatbelt.

At home, the electricity acted up. The night I plugged all three into the single circuit that feeds the study outlets and ran the first cluster load test, the breaker tripped. The whole house went dark, and hunting in the dark for a flashlight I thought: there was a hexagram where the light goes into the ground. I called an electrician and had a dedicated circuit pulled for the study. The electrician asked, "What are you running — a welder?" This time I gave the learned answer. "Computers." He asked nothing further. That training, apparently, extends to electricians.

And summer came. A few hours of cluster load-testing turned the study into a rainforest. I became a man who lives with three machines and two fans. The pool water had never been so sweetly cold.

A week before the expiry date, on the study shelf, three silver bricks turned quietly, lashed together with cables. The storage was empty.

The study had a receiving address.